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3 Simple Hacks For An Injury-Free And Safe Workout

We all know that exercise or exercise program like Fit, Healthy, Happy Mum, FitDad and SCPF has dozens if not, hundreds of benefits. But how sure are you that you’re doing your workout regimen safely and correctly?

Our body is composed of thousands of nerves, endless strands of muscle fibers and hundreds of bones and we only have one chance to take care of it… two if you’re really ‘lucky’.

And what better way to consider the longevity of our body through proper form and execution of different types of exercises.

If you want to avoid the following injuries from working out…

  • Sprained ankle
  • Shoulder injury
  • Knee injuries
  • Muscle pull and strain

Read on and find out how not only to avoid an injury but also maintain a healthy and safe training…

Warm Up

This is often overlooked by both experienced and newbies alike. It is never a good idea to workout muscles that are ‘cold’. Make sure you are warming up your body to increase your body's core temperature, blood flow to the working muscles and stretch a particular area of your body that you’ll be working out.

Don’t Just Train Hard, Train Smart Too

Just because you could do a specific exercise 10 or 15 years ago, doesn't mean you can exercise with the same speed and energy today. Be realistic about your training and not focus on what you use to do. "Too much, too soon" can be the number one reason why injuries occur. Gradually increase your time and the intensity of your workouts to prevent those troublesome injuries.

Hydration and Nutrition

What you eat and drink is just as important as your workout. When we sweat, we lose electrolytes which is necessary for muscle contraction and energy generation. Worse case scenario that can happen is dehydration. Is it a bad thing? Of course! Your internal organs can fail due to excessive dehydration. Don’t forget to rehydrate by consuming water. It’s the safest and cleanest liquid to keep your body hydrated.    

Consuming above average amount of a protein-based food source is recommended as it helps you repair your torn muscle fibers. Combine it with a balanced amount of carbohydrates and you’re good to go. Carbohydrates aren’t as bad as most fitness experts claim. They’re our main source of energy hence eating moderate healthy carbs is necessary.

I hope that I’ve provided you with a brief and direct education about how to maintain an injury-free exercise, don’t neglect them because they will matter in the long run.

If for some reason you’ve injured yourself in the middle of training, regardless of the severity, please have a professional check your condition.

Conveniently, you don’t have to go to the farthest reach of the earth to look for one! Dr. David Kieser is a specialist in the spine, hip, and an orthopaedic surgeon as well.

You can check out the link below if you’re in need of a professional to attend to your injury.

https://www.davidkieser.co.nz/

Healthy Chocolate Crackles (awesome for birthday parties!)

Last week was Alexis' birthday party, and many people always ask us how to make a birthday party for kids healthy, without being lame...  Like carrot sticks and broccoli and pieces of chicken.  We've done that.  People left very fast.

So we decided to recreate some party favourites, but with healthy ingredients.  Here's one of our favourites:

Mixing rice crispies with chocolate has always been a party favourite, except that about 5 minutes later, the kids are uncontrollable...

Mitigate the madness with this delicious recipe, and keep your hair in your head!

Ingredients:
  • 1 cup activated buckwheat
  • 1 cup shredded coconut
  • 4 tbsp of our chocolate spread (see our recipe here)
How to make:
  1. 1
    Mix all ingredients together in a bowl and spoon into cupcake papers.
  2. 2
    Put in fridge for 30 minutes to allow to go hard.
Activating nuts and seeds:

Seeds are like potential, once you water them, they change state from seed to tiny plant. Activating seeds is just getting the seed to a point that it is about to shoot and then eating it.

To do so, just soak your seeds or nuts in water and keep rinsing until you see little shoots appear. Dry out in the sun or in the dehydrator.

Activated buckwheat tastes a million times better than unactivated. Try it for yourself.

That was pretty vague, so here is the more accurate version:
  1. 1
    Soak a cup of buckwheat in water in the morning.
  2. 2
    At lunch, replace the water.
  3. 3
    At dinner, replace the water again.
  4. 4
    In the morning, they should be activated!

This recipe comes from the cookbook Healthy Junk.

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Healthy Junk Anzac Biscuit Recipe

You don't need to make them as thick, in fact I make mine as a slice:

I've adjusted the recipe so it's a carb load feast and super easy to eat - check it out:

Ingredients:

  • 50g coconut oil* (or 120g grass fed butter)
  • 140g banana flour (or 60g coconut flour and 90g tapioca starch)
  • 100g rice malt syrup or coconut nectar
  • 1 tsp bicarb soda
  • 70g coconut sugar (or rapadura)
  • 100g rolled oats (or quinoa flakes)
  • 50g shredded or desiccated coconut

*If using coconut oil, you'll need something else to make it bind.  I use an egg, or half a banana.

Preparation:

  1. Preheat oven to 160°C (350°F).
  2. Mix all ingredients together well.
  3. Scoop bikkies onto a lined baking tray. (Make sure you squeeze each biscuit together well with your palms.)
  4. If you're lazy like me, just make it into one big ol' slice, put a second piece of baking paper on top and flatten it with a BBQ flipper.  Take the top piece of baking paper off once you've flattened it.
  5. If while flattening it any rides the edges, you're just going to have to eat it...
  6. Put in oven for 8 - 12 mins depending on oven and how thick you make them. They should be golden brown.
  7. Allow to cool completely before eating as they will crumble.

Have you got Healthy Junk 1 and 2 yet?

50 more junk foods made healthy, just head on over here to get your copy!

Healthy Chocolate Recipe

Seriously, chocolate. It tastes exactly the same, it has the same gentle, fine crumble that chocolate has, but we’ve managed to make it without sugar, without milk and without guilt.

And it’s easier to make than sneaking one into the trolley without the check-out boy looking at your stomach!

Ingredients:
  • 70g finely grated cacao butter
  • 1/2 cup raw cacao powder, sifted*
  • 2 tbsp coconut nectar
  • Pinch of Himalayan sea salt
  • Seeds from 2 vanilla pods

If you prefer milkier chocolate (not so dark tasting), decrease the amount of raw cacao powder used.

How to make:
  1. 1
    Melt cacao butter in a small, dry metal or glass bowl over a saucepan of simmering water - or in your thermomix.
  2. 2
    Once melted, remove from heat and whisk in cacao powder, coconut nectar, salt and vanilla seeds.
  3. 3
    Fill chocolate moulds with mixture.
  4. 4
    Refrigerate until set.
  5. 5
    Hide it from the rest of the family (you’ll want it all). But you don’t need to hide yourself while you eat it anymore. This chocolate can be eaten outside of the pantry cupboard!
Have a Thermomix?
Here is the conversion for you:
  1. 1
    Make sure your Thermomix is completely dry! No water in it at all.
  2. 2
    Weigh in 70g of cacao butter and blend at speed 9 for 10 seconds to chop it in to fine flakes.
  3. 3
    Melt cacao butter in on temp 50, speed 2 for 3 minutes.
  4. 4
    Once melted, add in cacao powder, coconut nectar, salt and vanilla seeds from your pods. (You can also use vanilla powder or paste here.)
  5. 5
    Blend on speed 5 for 1 minute so everything is mixed well.
  6. 6
    Fill chocolate moulds with mixture.
  7. 7
    Refrigerate until set. Freezer works too.

Did you know?

Cacao is one of natures greatest antioxidants... so you better eat another piece.

This recipe comes from the cookbook Healthy Junk.

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Healthy chocolate fudge recipe (only 4 ingredients)

Yesterday, I posted our famous healthy chocolate recipe, and had a lot of people ask what substitute there is for cacao butter.

Unfortunately, you can't substitute cacao butter, so the recipe can't be changed from the original...BUT!

And here's a big but, (not butt!).

We have a healthy chocolate fudge recipe for you that requires only 4 ingredients.  So for all our friends who live in country NSW, here's your raw chocolate fudge recipe.  And OMG is it delicious - smooth yet creamy and chewy.

Ingredients:
  • 1/3 cup raw cacao powder
  • 1/3 cup coconut oil (liquid)
  • 1/4 cup coconut nectar
  • 1 pinch of Himalayan sea salt
How to make:
  1. 1
    Mix all ingredients together (blended is good for this). If your coconut oil and nectar is hard, just warm it for a couple of seconds in the microwave or very lightly over a stove top.  It only needs to be just warmer than room temp to melt.
  2. 2
    Pour in a small container lined with baking paper. (Baking paper is important, otherwise you won't be able to get it all out.  And you're going to want to get it ALL out!)
  3. 3
    Freeze for at least 2 hours. (Overnight is best if you can wait that long!)
  4. 4
    Cut into pieces and eat
  5. 5
    Store what's left in the freezer which is a good place to stash your healthy junk, because kids and spouses only look in the fridge or the pantry.

This recipe comes from the cookbook Healthy Junk 2.

Pin it for later http://bit.ly/HJ2FudgePIN

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All the different coconut ingredients explained

Ever wondered what the difference is between coconut flour, coconut aminos, coconut butter, coconut milk, coconut cream, coconut sugar and coconut nectar?

Wonder no more...

Coconuts are extremely dangerous.  If you lay under a coconut tree in a cyclone, one may fall off and conk you on the head.  And the relevance of what you just read?

Absolutely nothing.  It’s a little mind break so you can transition into the good stuff.  Learning about good food sources.  Or maybe we just call them foods, the “good” part is a given.  Any food that is not good for you, should not be called a food, it should be called trash.

Coconuts are used heavily in our cooking because they are amazingly versatile, while being extremely beneficial to human consumption, the processing is very simple (most can be done at home) and they are really cheap.

Apart from thousands of years of Eastern medicinal claims, the coconut has been given a modern thumbs up because it is one of the only sources of medium chain triglycerides (MCTs) on earth.

MCTs are fat.  A saturated fat (gosh!).  But unlike other fats, they are inert (don’t change composition in the body - think cholesterol = high blood pressure) and they don’t even go through the same metabolic pathway (they aren’t processed through the lymph system). This means you feel fuller quicker, and you can slip into ketosis without even realising it, because your body has an abundant supply of easy to use fats.  Put simply, ketosis is when your body burns fat instead of carbs.

Eating coconut flesh and it’s processed products like coconut oil, coconut milk, coconut cream (and concentrate), coconut flakes and coconut flour has been proven by much smarter people than us, to reduce body fat and generally make you a healthier person.  Cool, right?

So how does it all work?

Get a coconut, and smash it open.  The liquid inside is high in fibre, protein, vitamins and minerals as well as electrolytes and sugar.  Just be careful when buying it as a “water substitute” – it still has sugar in it, so don’t be thinking you can chug it all day while you sit at your office desk. Water is the best substitute for water.  But if you’re an endurance athlete, coconut water is better for you than chemical, sugary crap called Powerade or Gatorade.

Now that you’ve poured out the water (called coconut water), we’re left with the white flesh (called coconut meat).  If you dry this, you can grate it (makes coconut flakes also called shredded coconut). If you blend coconut meat for a long enough time, it turns into coconut flour.  If you blend coconut meat with water, then pass it through a sieve or nut bag, you get coconut milk.  (or you can just do it with the coconut water and the coconut meat while it is still wet.)   If you let coconut milk set in the fridge, you can skim the hard top layer off (called coconut cream or coconut butter).

You now can make coconut oil (virgin coconut oil) by pressing the flesh left in the nut bag with a screw press.  This is a time consuming process, so just buy coconut oil.  Please make sure it is virgin coconut oil, because any other coconut oil uses solvents like hexane to extract the oil.  Cold pressed and virgin are good words to look for on your food label.

Coconut nectar is not made from a coconut, it is actually made by draining the flower of a coconut palm.  It is a sugar, but it is low GI (diabetics use it a fair bit).  You can dry coconut nectar to make coconut sugar.

Finally, if you ferment the raw sap of a coconut tree, naturally aged and blended with sun dried sea salt, you get coconut aminos, which taste very similar to soy sauce, if not as salty.  You can buy coconut aminos from health food shops, just make sure they don’t sell you the soy ones…

 

For great tasting recipes featuring the star of the show, coconut, look at our cookbooks.

How to Make Spaghetti out of a Zucchini

Before anyone told us that wheat is why we are fat, we all knew it. Pasta, the staple dish of Italy is just not good to the Western man or woman’s stomach.

But don’t worry, you can make spaghetti out of zucchini, just spiral it in a machine like the one below, soak it in boiling water for a few minutes and you won’t be able to tell the difference (we tried it on our teenage son and his friends and they couldn’t tell the difference).

You can peel the zucchini first so they don’t ask what the green is in the pasta!

To buy one of these machines, just search spirooli in Google, should cost you around $40.

spaghetti

Want a recipe for spaghetti bolognese that's delicious and far healthier than the usual "carb load" version?  Click here.

This recipe comes from the cookbook Healthy Junk.

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Healthy Spaghetti Bolognese

Friday carb load before the big game!

Except that we overeat and the big game becomes the big lame.

“I got a stitch,” or that really heavy in the guts feeling are a thing of the past with our delicious, light spag-bol recipe that tastes exactly like the nasty version!

Ingredients:
  • 2 onions, chopped
  • 2 carrots, finely diced
  • 10 mushrooms, finely diced
  • 1 clove garlic
  • 500g lean grass fed beef mince (or kangaroo for extra leanness!)
  • 2 – 3 generous tbsp no-salt tomato paste
  • 4 diced tomatoes
  • 1/2 tsp smoked paprika
  • 1/2 cup fresh basil
  • 1/2 cup fresh oregano
How to make:
  1. 1
    Sauté the onion, garlic, carrot and mushrooms in a little olive oil over medium heat until softened.
  2. 2
    Add the beef and cook for 5 – 10 minutes until browned.
  3. 3
    Stir through the tomato paste and cook for about 3 more minutes.
  4. 4
    Add tomato and paprika
  5. 5
    Cover the pot and bubble over a low heat for 30 minutes until the sauce is thick and rich.
  6. 6
    For the last 10 minutes, throw in the basil and oregano.
  7. 7
    Serve over our zucchini spaghetti.

This recipe comes from the cookbook Healthy Junk.

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Healthy (but delicious) Carrot Cake

mmmm, just look at that picture of our healthy carrot cake.  It looks so naughty, and we can tell you that the icing has just enough crystallisation to feel like a very-bad-for-you cream cheese icing.

Bake one of these for a work birthday and you'll be a hit.  Not only does it taste good enough the new guy will love it, but it will be so healthy that the perpetual dieter can have some without kick starting a 2 day food bender.  Seriously, try it.  It will be weird because you'll want a second slice, but you won't have to have that dollop of guilt with it.

Ingredients:

Cake:

  • 2 medium carrots (grated)
  • 1 cup tapioca starch
  • 1/2 cup coconut flour
  • 1 tbsp baking powder
  • 1/2 tsp ground cinnamon
  • 1/2 cup coconut sugar
  • 3/4 cup coconut oil
  • 1/2 cup coconut nectar
  • 3 eggs
  • 1 tsp vanilla essence
  • 1/2 cup roasted pepitas

Icing:

  • 180g creamed goats cheese (same consistency as cream cheese)
  • 1/4 cup coconut nectar
  • 1/4 tsp pure vanilla essence
How to make:

Cake:

  1. 1
    Preheat oven to 180°C.
  2. 2
    Grease a small round cake tin lightly with some coconut oil and line with non stick baking paper.
  3. 3
    Mix all ingredients except carrots and pepitas in a large bowl or blender.
  4. 4
    Now gently stir in grated carrot and pepitas.
  5. 5
    Scoop the mixture into the cake tray. Filling it to the top as your cake will not rise much.
  6. 6
    Bake for 35 – 40 minutes
  7. 7
    Set aside to cool for about 10 minutes.
  8. 8
    Turn out onto a wire rack to cool completely.

Icing:

  1. 1
    Place the goats ‘cream’ cheese, coconut nectar and vanilla in a bowl. Use a wooden spoon to mix until well combined.
  2. 2
    Spread the icing over the cooled cake.

This recipe comes from the cookbook Healthy Junk 2.

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Healthy Onion Rings Recipe

If you’re not into fries, we’ll bet your choice is onion rings. Here’s a recipe that makes onion rings as tasty as their deep fried artery blocking cousins, but without the health risks.

Ingredients:
  • 2 medium onions
  • 3/4 cup banana flour (or gluten-free flour of choice)
  • 3 large eggs
  • 1 tbsp all purpose seasoning
How to make:
  1. 1
    Preheat oven to 180°C.
  2. 2
    Slice the onions and separate into rings.
  3. 3
    Place them in a bowl of water.
  4. 4
    Mix flour and seasoning together in a bowl.
  5. 5
    Beat eggs in a separate bowl.
  6. 6
    Dip wet onion ring in dry mixture, then egg, then roll in dry mixture again.
  7. 7
    Place them on a baking tray and bake for about 10 minutes before turning each ring (or you can just stir them).
  8. 8
    Continue baking until brown and very crispy on both sides.

This recipe comes from the cookbook Healthy Junk.

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